Principles of Management

Ian Graham's Blog on Operations & Innovation.

This is an excellent twenty minute video of a slide presentation by Harry Brignull, one of the curators of the Dark Patterns website. Dark Patterns are defined on the site as: “User Interfaces that are designed…

Recently Dr James Stewart gave a presentation entitled From Crowd to Cloud: the shaping and management of e-reputation in online freelance and crowdsourced work exchanges to Edinburgh University’s Social Informatics Forum. His talk drew on a…

There is an ongoing crisis in the meat industry over the substitution of horsemeat for beef in manufactured products, which, so far, has reached its nadir with the news that Findus beef lasagne is 0% cow…

The Francis report into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was published last week and is available online. The Stafford Hospital scandal became public in 2009 when the Healthcare Commission published a report investigating much higher…

In the past the Business School has had difficulty persuading final-year students to complete The National Student Survey. Each year the launching of the survey overlaps with the submission of honours dissertations, so students may have…

I was reminded by Ben Goldacre’s excellent erudite discussion on Radio 4 last week on the role of randomised control trials (RCT) in the development of public policy that the importance of RCTs in operations management…

Vijay Shankar, one of this year’s MBA class, invited Matt Fisher, Chief Operating Officer of EFQM (formerly the European Foundation for Quality Management) over from Brussels to speak to the class about the EFQM Excellence Model….

An extract from “Rivethead” by Ben Hamper, a book written in 1992 by an assembly line worker at the GM truck plant in Flint, Michigan. It neatly captures the surreal essence of Total Quality Management programmes…

Dr Ian Graham

Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh, Scotland. This blog supports his teaching in operations management, innovation and quality management and provides background on his research in the sociology of standards and the management of operational risk.